Journey into Oneness Across India

Embarking on a journey through India, I sought to understand the meaning of oneness – a state of enlightenment that sages across cultures have spoken of. From the bustling streets of Kolkata to the tranquil ashrams of the Himalayas, I found myself tracing not only geographical paths but also an inner path toward unity. Each encounter – with spiritual teachers, artisans, and ancient sites – became a mirror reflecting the insight that enlightenment is not a distant treasure but a realization within the psyche, attained by dissolving deep-seated patterns in the subconscious. This reflective sojourn blends personal narrative with philosophy, drawing on the wisdom of saints and seers to reveal a tapestry of oneness that transcends time, culture, and tradition.

Setting Foot on the Path

I began in Kolkata, where the Ganges flows steadily through the city’s heart, as if reminding its people of life’s continuous current. Here I met educators and innovators at Adamas University, including Dr. Manas Mandal – a psychologist bridging neuroscience and spirituality and board member of the World Happiness Foundation . In conversations on campus lawns, Dr. Mandal emphasized that true transformation involves transcending the ego’s illusions and reconditioning the subconscious mind. Modern psychology, he explained, echoes ancient wisdom: much of our behavior is driven by subconscious patterns, and awakening requires bringing these to light and dissolving them.

His words set the tone for my journey: the outer expedition would go hand-in-hand with an inner excavation, uncovering layers of conditioning that veiled the oneness within.Traveling north to the Himalayan foothills, I arrived at Shoolini University in Solan. There I encountered Dr. Saamdu Chetri, often called the Happiness Guru, who had recently founded the Yogananda Center for Happiness on campus, board member too of the World Happiness Foundation. In the crisp mountain air, Dr. Chetri spoke about the need to “know thyself” and live in harmony with nature. He described how the human body is intimately woven from the five elements – earth, water, fire, air, and ether – and draws its trillions of cells from the surrounding environment.

“Our very being is one with the universe,” he noted, explaining that respecting nature is respecting ourselves. If we pollute the elements around us, we only degrade our own bodies. His gentle reminder was that contentment and love for all life form the bedrock of happiness. In Solan’s sunsets, as the sky turned to fire over pine-covered hills, I reflected on his message: the boundary between self and environment is illusory – in truth, we breathe as one with the world.

Lessons from Sages and Teachers

My quest then led westward to Jaipur, where an unexpected teacher awaited in the form of an entrepreneur. Nand Kishore Chaudhary, founder of Jaipur Rugs, welcomed me into a village of rug weavers. This enterprise is built on a simple yet radical philosophy: find yourself by losing yourself in service. “The more I lose myself, the more I find myself,” Chaudhary told me, describing his company’s Higher School of Unlearning. New managers at Jaipur Rugs are sent to live and work among rural artisans, unlearning their egos and relearning empathy and collaboration. By connecting “the poorest of the poor with the richest of the rich,” his organization bridges worlds that were once divided.

Weavers in a village near Jaipur meticulously knotting threads into a rug. Their craft is a living meditation, embodying the philosophy of “finding yourself through losing yourself” in work and community.Sitting on the earthen floor beside veteran weavers, I watched as their hands moved rhythmically, knotting bright yarn into intricate patterns. The room hummed with a quiet focus. These artisans, many unlettered by formal education, taught me through their actions.

They wove not just carpets, but stories – each knot a prayer, each pattern a testament to unity in diversity. As I tried my hand at the loom, losing track of time, I experienced moments of flow where the boundary between “me” and the task dissolved. In that simple workshop, surrounded by laughter and the colors of Rajasthan, I felt the truth of Chaudhary’s teaching: in losing the self in meaningful work, one discovers a deeper Self connected to others.

The oneness here was tangible – a thread of love and dignity running from the artisans to global customers and back, completing what Chaudhary calls “the circle of blessing”.In the ancient city of Varanasi, I followed the whisper of history to Sarnath, where Gautama Buddha gave his first sermon. The Dhamek Stupa rose before me, a towering cylinder of stone marking the spot where the Dharma wheel was set in motion. Walking the grounds at dusk, I encountered a group of Buddhist monks chanting softly.

One monk shared with me a line from the Dhammapada: “All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?”. As these words sank in, I looked around at pilgrims from many lands circumambulating the stupa in harmony. Here was oneness in action – people of different tongues and robes united in reverence. The monk’s message, echoing the Buddha’s teaching, was that compassion arises naturally when we recognize that at the deepest level, we all share the same yearning for happiness. In that recognition, the walls between self and other crumble.

Sarnath impressed upon me that enlightenment is not an abstract ideal, but a lived understanding of interconnection – “See yourself in others” is both a call to empathy and a description of reality.

Enlightenment Within: Dissolving the Inner Barriers

As my journey continued southward, I carried these cumulative lessons like precious souvenirs in my mind. Meeting Sri Preethaji near Chennai brought the focus fully inward. At Ekam, the World Center for Enlightenment that she co-founded, I joined seekers from around the world in meditation beneath a massive golden dome reminiscent of a temple. Sri Preethaji is a modern mystic who speaks the language of both the ancient Upanishads and contemporary psychology.

In a gathering at Ekam, she addressed the root of human suffering and the promise of awakening 81,000 individuals to higher consciousness as a tipping point for humanity. Her words resonated with what I had learned so far: “Every time you live from a state of suffering, it is a wasted life,” she said firmly, reminding us that we oscillate between states of suffering and no-suffering, and that only by healing internally can we create a peaceful world.

She guided us to observe our thoughts without judgment, to witness the play of our subconscious fears and one transformative process, I found myself facing long-buried feelings of sadness. Instead of pushing them away, I sat with them in compassion, watching them dissolve like mist in the sunlight of awareness. I realized that enlightenment is an inside job – a gentle melting of the conditioned habits and ego-identities stored in the subconscious. No sage could hand it to me; I had to do the work of self-purification.

This was the integral truth that tied all my experiences together: the outer journey through sacred places and conversations had been catalyzing an inner journey through layers of my own psyche. Each teacher had, in their own way, pointed me back to myself. As Sri Preethaji often teaches, the “crux of every problem” lies in the state of consciousness, and to move from division to oneness requires shifting the mind from chaos to peace. In practical terms, this meant observing and releasing the subtle aggression, fear, and separation hiding in my thoughts – a lifelong practice of conscious living.

Threads of Unity in Culture and History

Traveling further to the southeast, I reached Auroville, an experimental township in Tamil Nadu founded on the vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother (Mirra Alfassa). Auroville’s charter declares that “Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity.” This ideal of human unity was not just theory – I saw it manifest in everyday life there. At dawn I joined a silent crowd gathering by the Matrimandir, Auroville’s spherical golden temple, as the first light of the sun glinted off its disk-like facets.

Visitors from India, France, America, and dozens of other places sat together in meditation. In that hush, it did not matter what language we spoke or what belief we held – the stillness was a shared communion. As I later walked through Auroville’s lanes, I met volunteers at Upasana Design Studio, where fashion meets social consciousness.

They spoke of “conscious living” and projects empowering local communities, reflecting the fusion of spiritual progress and material responsibility that Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga envisioned. Sri Aurobindo taught that the highest realization is not escapism from the world, but a transformation of life in the world – a raising of consciousness that brings “greater feelings of oneness, harmony, joy and love” into our earthly existence.

Auroville, with its solar kitchens and multilingual schools, felt like a living laboratory of that principle.Even the ancient traditions I encountered reinforced the idea that we are part of a grand continuity. In Chennai, I visited a traditional Nadi astrologer who carefully unrolled a brittle palm-leaf manuscript inscribed with mysterious Tamil verses. According to lore, these palm leaves contain the recorded destinies of souls – written by sages thousands of years ago and indexed by one’s thumbprint.

Skeptical yet intrigued, I watched as the reader matched my thumbprint to a leaf and narrated uncanny details about my life and personality. Whether one believes in this or not, the symbolism was profound: it was as if past masters were reaching across time to guide present seekers.

The experience reminded me of India’s deep time perspective – the belief in reincarnation and the soul’s long journey home. It struck me that while my current trip stretched a few weeks, my soul’s journey, if these sages were right, spanned lifetimes.

The palm-leaf tradition underscored a cultural understanding of oneness that extends through time: the past, present, and future are interwoven, just as individuals are interwoven with the collective. I realized that enlightenment in Indian thought is not only a personal achievement but a link in a chain of evolution – one’s awakening contributes to a greater whole.

One Truth, Many Traditions

As my travels neared their end, I paused to synthesize what I had learned. In the words of the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, “The Tao unites the world into one whole.” Different cultures have different names for this wholeness – Tao, Brahman, God, or simply Nature – but all point to an underlying unity.

The Buddha’s path of compassion, the Upanishads’ insight of the self (Atman) in all beings, and the Bhakti mystics’ songs of love all converge on the same realization: we are not separate. I recalled a verse from the Isha Upanishad that I had read in Pondicherry: “He who beholds all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, he never turns away from it.”

In Hindu philosophy, to see the Self (the divine spirit) in everyone is the mark of the enlightened – once you see that, how could you harm or hate another? The ancient Jain and Hindu ethos of ahimsa (non-violence) and the concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (“the world is one family”) echo this truth. Each spiritual tradition I engaged with was like a unique flower, but all were blooming from the same soil of oneness.Even modern secular thought nods to this truth when we speak of the interconnected biosphere or the “butterfly effect.”

In Bhutan, as Dr. Saamdu Chetri shared, the policy of Gross National Happiness recognizes collective well-being as an index of progress – a reminder that individual happiness cannot be isolated from the happiness of all. Oneness, I learned, is both a spiritual and a practical realization. It means understanding that our inner world affects the outer world and vice versa. As Lao Tzu implied, reconciling the apparent opposites – self and other, humanity and nature – leads to “wise and compassionate paths” that foster true peace.

Coming Home to Oneness

My journey through India eventually came full circle, concluding back in Kolkata where it all started. Yet, I was not the same person who set out weeks before. I carried within me a quieter mind and a fuller heart.

On my last evening, I stood on the banks of the Ganges as daylight faded. The city roared on in the distance, but I felt calm, observing the flow of the river. I understood now that enlightenment is not a dramatic thunderclap or a finish line to be crossed; it is a gentle awakening to what has always been present. It is the realization that beneath the surface of our separate stories, we are expressions of one indivisible reality – like waves upon the same ocean.

The sages I met did not give me oneness; they simply helped remove the obstacles to seeing that oneness was always here. It was in the smile of a Rajasthani weaver, in the blessing of a Buddhist monk, in the embrace of a Tamil villager, in the silence of a meditation hall. India, with all her diversity, had revealed to me the profound unity that underlies all existence. The final lesson I learned is one that the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Sri Aurobindo would all agree on: to truly know oneness, one must live it. It calls for continual practice – staying mindful of the present, being kind, and aligning one’s actions with the welfare of the whole.

As I board my flight heading to our Gross Global Happiness Summit at the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica, I carry no souvenirs except a journal filled with insights and a heart brimming with gratitude. The real journey continues – every moment is an opportunity to remember that we are one. In the words of the Mahābhārata’s sage Vyasa, “We behold what we are, and we are what we behold.” Looking out the window at the receding Indian landscape, I no longer see strangers and divisions, but a living tapestry in which I too am a thread. I set forth into the world again, determined to walk the path of oneness – a path as old as the Vedas and as immediate as each breath – carrying India’s timeless gift in my soul.

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